Hello all,
I was just chatting with people on the server and thought it would be a good idea to make a post for 2023 with some of my personal suggestions. Our current staff team gets some heat but has done a fantastic job with 2022 and what they have done with the server. I personally think the addition of EH, the different events, and other things were amazing but I also have some suggestions as I was a bit inactive at the time and some changes were put into place that I think could be changed for the better.
The first change that I would like to suggest to the community would be instead of buying land for 10F a block and selling for 5F. Changing this to buying land for 5F a block and selling for 2.5f a block. When you truly think about the change up to 10f. It really hurts new players more than old players. I have the ability that I can go out and region and take the hit (even tho i think its stupid) but for a new player to region 20k, they lose 10k of the hard earned money that they made instantly if they decide to go elsewhere. They also don’t really get any land for how much they are spending. In addition, for someone to want to realistically build say a house and try to sell it for profit (This is how people used to make an income), They would need a decent amount of land. At 10f a block its almost impossible to get a profit from building when you buy say a 100 by 100 for 100k and then add materials, time and labor into the cost. A small plot with a decent house on it goes from a realistic price to almost 150-175k. If we keep the buy price at 5f a block but put the sell price at 2.5f a block, it will hurt a lot of people who had land already but it also means that you are getting for more land for the money that you are spending. 50k at 10f a block is about a 70 by 70 but at 5f a block is a 100 by 100. Thats about a 5,000 area block difference with the 70 by 70 being at 4900 blocks and the 100 by 100 being at 10,000 blocks. With how big our server map is, I don’t think the problem is people region large portions of land, it’s the fact that now no one will buy any land as it doesn’t make any sense. People are just sitting on their money as if you buy land you really aren’t getting any land for the price you are paying.
The second suggestion that I have has to do more on the social media side of things and I know I will get the “Why don’t you do it” post. I truly think we should try to push a hellominers tik tok account and the instagram account. If we want new players we need to get our server seen and out into the public. This is a super simple suggestion that I think can go a far way.
The last suggestion also has to do with new players. I know ultra has mentioned he is going to be doing this all this year but we really need to make the starting of hellominers less confusing. With the removal of warps (I hate it but I also think its a good thing), the airport process isn’t really explained and can be extremely confusing. We also have jobs at eh and the sand pit which is amazing. We just need to get a better starting point for players when they join. When players join the server now, they join and leave about 10mins later. What if we added something to the tutorial that had them get their first piece of property such as an apartment and then introduced them to the job resources we offer. We have an absolutely amazing server and the staff have worked so hard on these resources but I don’t think they are being used by new players the way they should be.
These are just some suggestions. Feel free to add anymore and discuss
Thank you to all the staff who put so much time into making HM the place it is and I hope there is no offense taken by any of this. I truly appreciate everything you guys have done and do. All your hard hard isn’t going unnoticed
Thanks
Soc
As for the landprice, which we debated yesterday for far too long let me condense my reply one more time.
The argument that you lose money instantly when you buy land is a false one. You only lose money if you sell it back to the government.
In the past people treated land as a bank account to hide their wealth. With a 10F buy price that practice is in the past so you only buy land when you know, you actually want to build something.
If you don’t sell the land to gov you don’t lose money, that’s how simple it really is. I can’t seem to get that through you.
As for selling wild regions to other people as a market. I don’t really recall that ever being a huge market. Most real estate is in gov or private cities, places where land prices are 20F or higher and people have no problem paying 3, 4 times land value.
Regarding to social media promotion. I agree, but it’s harder than it seems. There is a reason social media manager is a job these days, getting seen on TikTok or Instagram requires a consistent stream of daily uploads of high quality content. Sure the shorts can be 5 to 15 seconds but they still require to be quality content or else the algorithms won’t even push it.
We’ve done some Instagram marketing with Kom4ever in the recent past but we never reached more than 6000 people, which seems like a lot of people but Instagram analytics are funky and it’s barely anything. This was mostly with pictures of stuff you can find on HM. Most images were high quality but because everyone and their momma has to be a TikTok clone it’s becoming harder for still images to get noticed in the algorithms.
As of now I don’t have the resources nor time to consistently make quality content but feel free to send videos to be submitted.
As for tutorials, wholeheartedly agree, changes are on the way.
So my only thing about the whole land discussion is that at 10f a block, I am spending 2x the amount for far less land but we have far more land in our world than when it was 5f a block. I do not think that its bad to not give 100% of your money back. I just think buying at 5f a block and only getting 2.5f a block back is more practical. 10f a block is super steep for wild land. Thats pricing a block of wild land more than diamonds were/ probably are rn. If I want to buy a large amount of wild land for a project, 10f a block cuts my project size in half. Also for a new player, 10f a block is super steep. And I know you don’t agree with this but promoting the creation of cities isn’t really what we should be pushing right now. We would be better off getting rid of/fixing up the cities on the map we currently have. If we look at the premagnus map, that area of the map is just city ontop of city. We could probably cut this in half if we got a group together and work on it. Or we just take old cities and w/e them out and regen the wild land. Just a thought that idk if you’ll agree with.
As far as social media, I kinda figured that was a big case of it. Its def a tougher thing to arrange. I just think a goal for Hellominers by end of 2023 should be to try and have this setup for at least 1 of the 2 plateforms. It will be alot of work but its a realistic and solid goal for us as a community to have.
I 100% agree. 10f a block wild land only hurts the average player or arguably every player. People might have hid their money in land before but so what? Who cares about that lol you can see what regions people own. I think that is a pretty weird argument to justify raising the land prices.
Tiktok and other social media:
So far what I have seen is mostly just random stuff from the server around posted as an advertisment.
For tiktok to even be watched (i totally don’t have 12k followers with most viewed vid 2.2M), the viewer has to be instantly hooked on to see rest of the video due to todays short attention spam. What can we do then? Well we can throw out some player filmed content, not completely related to HM. Instead of posting oh hey guys come see my new tower in west city, have instead a post with ironball league with of course, commentary made to catch the viewer. Make it interresting, special and of course, FILL IN THE REQUIRMENT FOR TODAYS SHORT ATTENTION SPAN.
also a note that I have seen working for me:
Reddit helps quite a lot. Let players post their cool loooking builds in subbreddits, like a special ice cream in the middle of the city with cool skyscrapers around, and add in the comments that this was played on HM (don’t just throw the IP out pls… rather get them to this site with a bing search)